It takes a fool to travel in Al Gore’s figurative foot steps. so Ranulph Fiennes plays the fool, from the Washington Post:

LONDON â€” British explorer Ranulph Fiennes on Monday pulled out of an expedition to cross Antarctica during the region’s winter after developing frostbite â€” a bitter disappointment for an adventurer who had spent years preparing for one of the last great polar challenges.

The 68-year-old and his five-member team had hoped to traverse nearly 4,000 kilometers (2,500 miles) in a place where temperatures often dip as low as minus 70 Celsius (minus 94 Fahrenheit). The expedition, dubbed “The Coldest Journey,” will continue without him.

“The condition is such that he has very reluctantly decided … to withdraw from Antarctica while the possibility to do so still exists, before the onset of the Antarctic winter,” the expedition said in a statement.

Fiennes, who has been going where others fear to tread for decades and in 2009 became the oldest person to summit Mount Everest, already is missing parts of his fingers on his left hand because of frostbite suffered on a North Pole expedition a decade ago.